Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  Rodney: ‘He used to go for a long time without talking to anybody, when he was very bad. He used to play a lot of music. He used to sit there, leaning back against that piano, with those two speakers on, and the record player on … Times when he was prepared to talk at all were few and far between, and when they happened, you had to be ready to try and help him as best you could.’

  Molly: ‘He was very, very bad when he wanted to talk, you knew he was. Sometimes he’d say: “Are you busy?” And, of course, whatever I was doing, I wasn’t busy, and just let him talk, because you so longed to be able to do something to try and help him.’

  It had all happened so swiftly. Less than three years after quitting Cambridge delighted with his new recording contract and full of optimism about his new career, Nick was back home, sleeping in his boyhood bedroom. A gaunt and silent figure who haunted Far Leys and then disappeared unexpectedly, driving long into the night. Even that solitary pleasure was reliant on his parents’ good graces. Nick would frequently break down, or simply run out of petrol, and then he would phone home, waking his father, and ask to be collected.

  Time and again Nick would take off in the family car, or later his own, and as the flat blackness wrapped around him, he would drive, and drive and drive. Yet there was rarely any purpose to the journeys. He was quite likely to simply turn around and make his way home again. If he did arrive anywhere, and stayed, it would usually be a wordless visit, the silence which shrouded him unsettling his friends. Then, after an hour, or a week, he would return to the car, again without speaking, and head off into the night.

  Nick’s fondness for driving is mentioned repeatedly by those who knew him. Did he perhaps find peace in the mechanics of driving, or was it simply a means of escape? Apart from music – and his schoolboy athletics – driving was pretty much the only hobby or passion anyone seems to have noticed in Nick, and it remained a love all his life. From teenage odysseys through France to solitary late-night venturings trying to escape the darkness, Nick welcomed the freedom which driving brought. Perhaps it was the solitude he liked, or the speed, which effectively blocked out reality; or simply being in control of something in his life.

  ‘He was a very good driver, quite nippy,’ Paul Wheeler recalls. ‘It was like sprinting in the car. He wasn’t reckless … He had a little white car I remember, I can’t remember the model, but it wasn’t at all flashy. He did like driving, and was not at all hesitant. He would say: “Let’s go somewhere”, like when we went out to the coast… When we were in Ascot, he wouldn’t think twice about driving down from Tanworth, and that must have been quite a long drive. I don’t recall that he ever asked for more than the address, never asked how to get there, which is quite interesting. It goes against this “lost boy” image. He could find his way very well!’

  Following James Dean’s death in a car crash, The Times wrote of ‘a lonely young man, haunted by insecurity, longing for affection, yet thrusting it away from him, gifted yet suspecting his gifts, ambitious yet preferring to live like a tramp, in love, like T.E. Lawrence, with speed, and hugging a surly manner around him like a protecting cloak’. There are echoes of Nick Drake in that appraisal, as there are in the life of T.E. Lawrence. During his life as a gentleman ranker in the aftermath of his desert triumphs in the First World War, Lawrence of Arabia loved what he called the ‘voluntary danger’ of driving fast along country roads. For Lawrence, there was a certainty in speed, a pleasure in the isolation of hurtling along, in control of his vehicle and lost in the momentum. In 1935 Lawrence was killed by that momentum, when his motorbike swerved to avoid two young cyclists, and he was hurled over the handlebars to his death.

  Paul Wheeler: ‘That sense of just going off. Of feeling abandoned. He certainly did that more and more towards the end of his life. I know that his parents talked about him setting off from home, going somewhere, and ringing up and saying bring me back.’

  Brian Wells was married and living in Eastbourne at the time, and became used to his old friend ringing and announcing he would be driving down from Tanworth: ‘Nick would come quite late at night, and he’d run out of petrol two miles up the road. He resented going to garages and putting petrol in the car … so I went off and helped him fill up the car with petrol. And we all went to bed, and by the time we got up in the morning, he’d gone. That sort of stuff happened a lot.’

  Nick’s ambivalent attitude to his friends extended also to the form of transport he relied on so much. Brian Wells explained that when he wasn’t using his parents’ car: ‘Nick drove clapped-out cars. The last one he had was quite pokey but he blew it up, he just ran out of oil. I’m sure he did it deliberately … Impulsive: “Fuck it, I’m just going to keep driving it. I’m not going to put any oil in it” – almost out of frustration, bloody-mindedness. And from time to time this would appear, this kind of frustratedness. It was almost an arrogance, because he would wait for twenty-four hours, sleep on somebody’s floor, then ring up Rodney, and Rodney would bail him out. To some extent it was taking advantage of his parents.

  ‘It was slightly irritating … because we were all driving clapped-out Mini vans and things, and there was Nick … just not taking any responsibility, knowing he was quite capable of doing so, and then when asked: “Why didn’t you put any oil in?”, “Oh, I just couldn’t get it together.” It was almost as though it was kind of rather cool: “Oh, I’m just so untogether, man, I just couldn’t get it together to put any oil in.” That it was far too mundane a thing.’

  Rodney: ‘He had his own car, and he’d then make a decision to go away somewhere, and he’d get into his car and drive off, sometimes he’d get about two or three miles, and come back. Sometimes you didn’t know where he’d gone. He used to travel tremendous distances. It used to be a sort of therapy to him to be able to drive. He used to set off with the idea of going up to London to see some friends, sometimes he’d get to London. Sometimes, we heard subsequently, there was a girl he knew very well, and he’d just walk into her flat and sit there, and she knew and was accustomed to him. And he’d get up and walk out without saying anything and drive home again. Other times he’d drive out, and run out of petrol, and couldn’t bring himself to go and get some more. And then he’d ring us up, and we’d set off, all over the country …’

  Out of the blue, Nick would turn up on the doorsteps of friends. John and Beverley Martyn were used to seeing him in Hastings. He was a familiar visitor at the Suffolk home of John Wood, Sound Techniques’ owner, and his wife Sheila, who had a special bond with Nick (‘she was his confidante’ Robert Kirby told me). Talking to Patrick Kampert for the Chicago Tribune, Wood remembered: ‘He would suddenly turn up for a few days. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything. He was very self-contained. He could sit and say nothing for hours. It was unnerving.’

  Friends like Brian Wells and his wife were never surprised when Nick just appeared, but it could be a terrible shock for those who were unaware of his harrowing decline. Richard Charkin, who had spent an incident-packed month in Morocco with Nick in early 1967, and remembered him fondly from his time at Cambridge, told me: ‘After Cambridge, I’d moved down to London, and we’d lost touch, but one day I bumped into him in the street in South Kensington. He was looking pretty bad, and it was the week before he died. I felt terribly guilty because I said I’d get in touch … But when he came to London he was less … friendly. In Cambridge, he used to come round and see me as often as I would go round and see him … in London that was not the case.’

  It was not all darkness, even during those last months. Brian Wells recalls, during a day spent with Nick in his bedroom at Far Leys, picking up a guitar and starting to play. Recognizing the riff, Nick took up his saxophone, and for a while the two jammed away on Henry Mancini’s familiar, throbbing ‘Peter Gunn’ theme.

  ‘I think he was a sensitive guy,’ Brian says. ‘After he’d been in the psychiatric hospital… I was talking about Bryter Layter, and getting him to play it, and talking about tracks on i
t, because he would show me tunings. This is when he had gone back to Tanworth … and I would go up there just to hang out and have a laugh. And then we’d play tracks off Pink Moon, and I remember saying, God, if I’d made that record and it hadn’t sold, I’d have been very pissed off. And he said: “Well, now you know what’s going on with me.” He actually said that. Which was rare for him, because normally he was very unforthcoming.’

  For Nick’s mother, the only hope came when he felt able to communicate, and tried to share his feelings. Towards the end of 1974 Molly took it as a hopeful sign when Nick asked to borrow her Linguaphone records, to brush up his conversational French. She was even more delighted when Nick felt confident enough to plan a visit to Paris.

  For years rumours have persisted that the one relationship Nick had enjoyed during his life was with the chanteuse Françoise Hardy. Speaking about Nick for the first time, Françoise denied the stories: ‘I was more attracted by Nick as an artist than as a man; even though he was that explosive mixture, which usually seduces me totally, of purity, innocence, beauty – as much exterior as interior – and of a fascination for death. Maybe my subconscious self understood that Nick’s instinct for death was too strong, both for himself, and in regard to me and what I could have done to combat it.’

  Like most British teenagers, Nick would have become aware of Françoise Hardy when her song, ‘All Over The World’ became a British hit in March 1965. The twenty-one-year-old Hardy personified all that was alluring and enticing and Gallic. Wistful and with her long, willow hair framing her face, Françoise captivated Beatles, Stones and Bob Dylan (who name-checked her on the sleeve of his fourth album) with her undeniably French appeal.

  Robert Kirby: ‘He was exactly the same age as me, and I was madly in love with Françoise Hardy … She was beautiful, and I’m sure that’s where it started. Nick hadn’t got a voice, but he used his voice perfectly on his own stuff. Françoise Hardy also hadn’t got a voice. The French also come from a culture where they declaim the words, rather than have to have much of a melody. It’s the lyrics that carry the song. French chanson culture has always been totally different to German, English, American, Italian in that it’s the words that matter. They don’t write strong melodies.

  ‘It is the concept, the atmosphere of the whole. It is not based on a catchy tune. The French would latch on to “La Vie En Rose”, it doesn’t really matter what the tune is … you use music to deliver a lyric. I think that attracted Nick as well, because in fact his vocal melodies aren’t that strong: if somebody asked you to sing a Nick Drake song, it’s very hard to do. I think that made him think perhaps Françoise Hardy could do his stuff well: to deliver, to declaim atmospherically, a lyric.’

  Françoise Hardy’s first hit, ‘Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles’, came in 1962, when she was only eighteen. By 1968 she was moving away from the image of the bruised and vulnerable chanteuse, recording songs by Serge Gainsbourg and Leonard Cohen. Joe Boyd: ‘I went with Nick to visit Françoise Hardy, who was interested in recording some of his songs. We went and had tea with Françoise. That began because there was a guy called Tony Cox, who was a producer who worked at Sound Techniques, and he played Nick’s songs to her, because the album was her attempt to break the English market. She loved them, thought they were wonderful. He put me in touch with her, and I arranged to go visit her with Nick, and we went to Paris together. It was while we were making Bryter Layter, I think, May or June of 1970. We climbed to her beautiful flat, at the top of one of those old buildings on the Ile St Louis. We had tea. Nick said not a word the entire time. There was an agreement he would send her more songs; we might have sent her a tape of the rough mixes of Bryter Layter, so there was a follow-up, but nothing ever happened.’

  Françoise Hardy: ‘I no longer remember how I discovered Nick Drake’s songs. Maybe I bought his first record at the sight of the sleeve. Whatever it was, I loved it straight away … For me, he didn’t belong to a particularly British tradition: his style was quite different from that of The Beatles, The Stones and other groups that I was listening to a lot around this time. It is the soul which emerges from his songs, and that touched me deeply. The soul of romantic melodies, poetic but at the same time refined … as well as the very individual timbre of his voice, which adds to the melancholy feel of the whole thing.

  ‘I loved all the songs – the early ones as much as the later – but it never occurred to me to record any of them because my vocal and rhythmic limits, as well as my whole personality, make me prefer to sing more simple songs, a bit more “subtle” than Nick’s. I don’t remember the dates of our meetings, I remember more the circumstances. Every time I get enthusiastic about singers who are, as yet, little known, I talk about them to everyone, including the journalists who interview me. So Nick knew from the press that I appreciated his work. So he came to see me at the studio where I was recording in London. He also came to Paris and I remember we went out to dinner with my best friend at the time, a Brazilian woman called Lena, to the Eiffel Tower restaurant. We were going there to watch a singer – I don’t remember which one any more – and as Nick arrived unannounced, we took him with us.’

  On his way to stay at Chris Blackwell’s villa in Algeciras in 1972, Nick stopped off in his favourite city, planning to visit Françoise. Joe Boyd: ‘There was a legend, which I never heard from Nick, that he went to Paris subsequently, in ‘72 or ‘73, when he was on his way to Chris Blackwell’s house in Spain, and he rang her doorbell, and a secretary or maid came to the door, and he stammered and didn’t say anything, left a message, but never came back.’

  Françoise Hardy recalled: ‘Nick seemed, and no doubt was, so shy, so wrapped up in himself, that in retrospect I’m astonished that he managed to come and see me two or three times, even knowing that I appreciated his enormous talent… When he arrived at the studio he would hide in the corner and not say a word. As I am also quite shy, particularly with artists I admire, and because I speak English badly, communication between us was never great. But I had the impression that to know he was appreciated, loved, gave him confidence; and that to feel that his silent presence was accepted, was enough for him.’

  In the autumn of 1974 Nick Drake again found a degree of contentment in Paris. His life over the preceding two years had taken on the aspect of a dark, spreading stain. But back on the boulevards he had first visited as a teenager a decade before, Nick was by all accounts relaxed and convivial. The shadows which had engulfed him, seemed to be clearing; and strolling by the banks of the Seine in the mellow early autumn sunshine, he seemed to be revitalized.

  True to the bohemian aura of Paris and the romantic image he once had of himself, Nick stayed with some English friends who owned a barge on the Seine near Notre Dame. Leaves lined the streets, thin October sunshine lightened the skies, and in the evenings a slight chill in the air made the sanctuary of the pavement cafés even more enticing. It is a brief period of Nick’s life of which nothing more is known, though much has been speculated. It would be nice to believe that during that short stay, he found a degree of happiness, or at least a lightening of his heavy burden.

  Françoise Hardy has a vague memory of a dinner with Nick on that visit. Her recollection is darker: she remembers a dinner when Nick sat opposite her in total silence. She did not recall him uttering a single word throughout the entire meal. Despite his grasp of conversational French, during his last visit to Paris Nick had little to say for himself.

  Any sunshine he found during that final stay in Paris was all too fleeting. On his return to England, Nick went home to Tanworth, where he would live out the few remaining weeks of his life.

  Chapter 16

  Far Leys was a large house but Nick’s bedroom was tiny, a simple room, with a small, circular window in one corner. He slept in a single bed, next to which stood a plain wooden chair with a cane seat. Near to the bed, just the other side of the window, was an old, wooden desk over which hung a still life of flowers in a vase.

&n
bsp; To the right of the door was an alcove with a built-in bookcase; among its contents were volumes of verse by Browning and Blake, commentaries on the work of Chaucer, Buddhist scriptures, novels by D.H. Lawrence, a copy of that key existential text, Hamlet, and the Scaduto biography of Dylan which Brian Wells had given him.

  In 1974 Dylan was briefly signed to Island, so for a short while during the last year of his life, Nick was a labelmate of the man who had so inspired him. Dylan was well represented in Nick’s record collection, with the sepia-covered Blonde On Blonde evident, as well as Tim Hardin’s Bird On A Wire, Leonard Cohen’s first album, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Judy Collins’s In My Life, Randy Newman’s much-loved eponymous debut, Ralph McTell’s You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here and Island’s compilation album Bumpers, featuring Nick’s own ‘Hazey Jane I’.

  An album of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, bought in Aix seven years earlier, was lying on Nick’s turntable when he died – presumably the last record he ever listened to. Next to his bed Molly found a copy, in the original French, of Albert Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Camus was fascinated by the myth of Sisyphus, the father of Ulysses, whose punishment in the afterlife of Hades, was to roll a huge stone up to the top of a hill; but as the stone always started to roll down again just as it reached the summit, his task was never completed. Molly kept the book she had found by her son’s bed, and in the wake of his death struggled to read it in the hope that Nick: ‘might have been trying to tell me something’.

  Nick went to bed early on the night of 24 November 1974, and never came back.

  The world he left behind knew little of him any more. His name was never seen in the music press now. It had been two years since his last album, Pink Moon, and there were other names to be covered. New acts, who went out and gigged, who were seen by their fans and didn’t sit at their parents’ home staring out of the window.